Beggars Banquet: Musicians get half their royalties from streaming services

Martin Mills, chairman of Beggars Group, said that streaming services have changed the way people listen to music, because the “friction-less” experience makes users much more likely to experiment with sampling new artists or delve into musicians’ back catalogues, and that they had given artists with substantial bodies of work a major financial boost as a result.

“Some of our catalogue artists earn more from streams than downloads of individual tracks [or] any other format,” he said. “If we didn’t have digital we wouldn’t have a business. Physical is still important to us but the lesson we learned over last few years is that you have to strike a balance between giving people what they want on the one hand and actually being a business [and charging for content].”